oil sands

1. Surface deposits of tarry sand that contain large quantities of petroleum.

The major deposits of oil sands in North America are in the western United States and northern Canada.

Extracting the oil from these sands is difficult and expensive.

Example Sentences

The province’s leader, Danielle Smith, warns that more Albertans are pushing to leave Canada because they are fed up with what they see as Ottawa’s attempts to strangle the oil sands, a lucrative source of crude that is also regarded as being among the most environmentally unfriendly types of petroleum to extract.

Read more on The Wall Street Journal

No projects have been selected yet, but the government has hinted at a few items on its wish-list, including a pipeline along the British Columbia coast and a carbon-capture project in Alberta's oil sands.

Read more on BBC

While statistics are fuzzy, a large percentage of the fly-in, fly-out workers in Alberta’s oil sands are Newfoundlanders.

Read more on New York Times

The regulations would have drastically curtailed imports of crude extracted from the oil sands of Alberta, Canada — a labor-intensive process that requires so much energy to produce that fuels derived from the region are considered among the world’s dirtiest.

Read more on Seattle Times

It said it would also end direct funding for any oil and gas projects in the Amazon or in the Arctic Circle, or which were aimed at extracting, processing or transporting oil from oil sands.

Read more on BBC